


Sundays are for stomach aches

by venus woman and giant saurian (grayglube)



Series: The Long Con [2]
Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: F/M, Honey Trap, Power Kink, dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 01:11:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14944836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/venus%20woman%20and%20giant%20saurian
Summary: Learned helplessness is not the same thing as being tricked, as running a con.





	Sundays are for stomach aches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Inkyfingerstoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkyfingerstoo/gifts).



> So, first off thank you to hasitsclaws who preread this for me before I posted even though it's not her kind of Kichie and Inkyfingerstoo who always leaves me super nice comments on tumblr and goes gimme gimme gimme (which I actually love). Don't know you in RL but think you're super cool.
> 
> I'd read "Heaven is a red thing" first before trying this, again, it's dark fic and what I like to call "soft amaru." It's amaru but not amaru. And Richie is not nice.

The world is red around her.

* * *

 

The world inside of her is red.

* * *

 

Her foot’s fallen asleep under her on the sofa repurposed as office furniture, and a woman with too many initials after her name to mean anything real anymore asks her another question.

“Intrusive thoughts?”

“Not today.”

“But you have been having them?”

“Sure.”

The woman makes a noise on the smaller loveseat.

“What kind of intrusive thoughts?”

“Nothing specific.”

It cuts off the: _‘can you be more specific’_ question early.

Their time is almost done.

“Are you afraid of it happening again?”

 _‘It’,_ something repeats. “I’m not in Mexico anymore,” Kate tells her.

No minute goes to waste. She’s worked it out, her therapist makes six dollars a minute.

The only other profession Kate can think of that’s comparable is hooker.

“Do you mean ‘Mexico’ as the event or ‘Mexico’ as the place,” the woman asks.

Kate moves both feet to the floor, curling her toes against pins and needles.

“Kidnappings are more likely to happen in Mexico than in Bethel, is what I meant,” she says.

The woman nods again.

“What about those feelings we talked about the last time? Do you still feel like you’re having trouble connecting with your family now that you’re home?”

“I think we’ve been trying more.”

“What have you been trying?”

“Boardgames, softball in the park, church.”

_‘You were praying to me.’_

“What do you think is having the most impact?”

“Church,” Kate answers, a safe, benign answer. “Do you want to know why?” she asks, dully.

“Sure.”

But, really it was her next question anyway, Kate has been able to guess them for the last few visits. It might be repetition but she suspects it’s something more than just pattern recognition intuition.

“Desensitization,” she says.

“To what?”

Kate smiles. “Men in suits.”

The therapist, in a different mint-green cardigan than the one she wore two sessions ago, does not laugh.

“Have you been journaling at all,” the woman asks, there are too few open ended questions today and Kate knows that that is an example of bad communication technique.

Her therapist looks hungover. Birthday party or a high-school reunion she guesses.

“Yes.”

Not words though, graven images.

Eyeless women, having sex with snakes.

“How often?”

“At night, when I can’t sleep.”

“How often is that?”

She doesn’t think she needs to sleep anymore, she thinks she does it only out of habit.

“Often, but I don’t want a prescription. I don’t want to handle things that way,” she tells the woman.

“Does the journaling help, at night?”

“I don’t know, a little, maybe. Things come up, I think about it, no one leaves me alone during the day and my mother still opens my door at night to make sure I’m there. Closed doors make her anxious.”

The woman nods, writes down the talking point for when she meets her parents for their own separate session. “Is that hard for you, having them anxious about where you are?”

“I just want a little privacy.”

“There are some ways to bring that up we can talk about.”

“Okay.”

It’s all the time they have for the day.

* * *

 

“Time magazine called abduction a ‘grotesque transaction,’” her mother tells someone in the kitchen over store bought pie and fake sugar sweetened coffee, another curious church mouse has come to visit, fat from barbeque, stuck on Jesus and screaming at her children.

Kate watches herself as national news for a few months until another school shooting knocks her story out of the top ten stories, never to return until a lifetime movie comes out about her _experience_ , or she writes a tell-all book about it and her faith and how it’s helped in her _recovery_.

She’s alright going back to normal life, the thing inside of her not knowing the difference.

It only knows her body is foreign and her mind is some blurred ideal, her life will do for now.

It’s an evolution of her soul that she’s working her way through, not anything a banal as forgiveness and forgetting.

* * *

 

For months she endures the home schooling like she’s eight again, the tutors who are as just as likely to record cell phone video of her prepping for SATs to sell to tabloids as they are to help her pass Algebra II.

For weeks agents come to the house asking her questions, a bigger investigation into stranger things than just the kidnapping of an underaged church humanitarian.

For longer than any of that people send letters and gifts and thoughts and prayers and it’s nice to be remembered.

* * *

 

Snakes move over her ankles and between her legs, he tells her how good she’s doing, how well she’s taking it.

She wakes up sopping wet.

She does sleep, but only when she wants to.

Sometimes she even thinks something inside of her misses him.

She realizes quickly enough that she only wants something _from_ him.

It’s longing all the same and it calls out to him like she did in the desert the night he killed her.

* * *

 

They talk a lot about something broken in her, her mind some new intangible mess, the meekness that’s surely from lost autonomy.

She’s just thinking.

And there’s nothing to say.

But her father tries, her brother looks sadder than she’s expected, her mother’s watery smile is an affront to what brittle kindness she has left in her to give them as they sit around the table bowing their heads in grace.

* * *

 

A therapy pet seems like a stretch, dogs and cats too big, fish and hamsters live in tanks and tanks are too close to cells and boxes.

Her mother drops the topic of conversation that night at the dinner table almost as soon as it’s introduced.

Her brother passes the corn casserole around to the right.

Her father smiles like a goddamn lunatic.

She resists the urge to sigh.

* * *

 

Learned helplessness is not the same thing as being tricked, as running a con.

She only needs to wait, they’ll show up, one or the other and she makes bets with herself on who it will be, while she spends the afternoons after school looking out the window.

The therapist says something about human contact about spines shriveling up, contact of any kind becomes preferable to none, that it becomes valued and that that’s _okay_ because it means survival and survival is better than death and being found is better than anything.

But she hasn’t been found, not yet.

“He went down on me and told me he could taste my soul,” she tells her therapist.

Not surprisingly, the woman in her rabbit nose pink cardigan has nothing to say to that.

* * *

 

It wasn’t really about possession, it was about food.

She fed him and he just left his dirty plates behind.

* * *

 

It’s not hypervigilance that keeps her gaze moving when she leaves the house, she’s just waiting.

The foreshortened future of previously promised bad things, of taken away good things isn’t some jammed false idea, she’s felt it and understood it. It was a true thing when she was dying.

She can only imagine, when the frenetics of a black pen rolling out the shapes of snakes start to slow, growing more laborious once dawn supercedes the single digits of the nighttime hours, she can fantasize that a foreshortened future has been all Richard Gecko and his brother have been able to think about when the broadcast news found out what hospital she was being released from, when her tepid smile was broadcast the world round and prayer vigils began to start anew.

* * *

 

She vomited every day for the first week she was home.

Her scathing, ‘ _Don’t worry I’m not pregnant,’_ made her mother cry.

Something new is stretching its limbs inside of her, waking up and growing every day.

It was hard in the beginning with so many people offering so much of themselves.

Prayers in church, her father’s congregation crying for her return, as much a celebrity as the baby who got to play Jesus in the Christmas service.

It’s like she’d eaten too much, too fast.

She’s tempered it, but the stomach aches still come every Sunday.

* * *

 

It wasn’t about possession then.

It’s about hunger now.

* * *

 

“Blue or White?” her mother asks, catalog selection of new church dresses for her to order from open on the coffee table beside her chemistry textbook.

“Blue,” she answers, not looking.

Her mother’s mouth draws tight but Kate says nothing, giving her choices is important now, it’s about control, about giving in to her.

Surrender is a sort of prayer to.

* * *

 

He’s lying sideways across the bed, half his limbs hanging off each side.

He’s not really there but his hands still reach out to stroke her lower spine.

She wants to see his eyes under glass, she wants them in her jewelry box, watching her from across the room, staring at her while she sleeps.

She knows where he is, can feel the miles rolling by beneath the tires of the car that crosses into Texas towards a town he wouldn’t know the way towards unless someone made him a map to follow.

He doesn’t need a map.

* * *

 

Her brother tries to make things normal, movies on the couch and eating all the after school snacks when they definitely shouldn’t.

It’s not really trying when he doesn’t care, but she can pretend too. He prays the hardest, though no one would ever guess.

They make it halfway through a  Liam Neeson movie before he remembers the plot.

“Well, that’s not what happened,” she says, grinning at his aghast open mouth, as the father fights to find his kidnapped daughter.

Her brother cries and tells her that he’s sorry.

Supplication, benediction, all prayers too.

* * *

 

She’s in church when she sees him first.

He’s gone when the service ends but his black car is too loud to make a clean exit from the lot.

It rolls down her block every day after like the rising summer heat, he’s behind the wheel with black sunglasses like the devil’s own eyes over his stare.

She watches from her  bedroom window, the front steps, the tree on the lawn, the mailbox, and the other side of the street.

He cruises behind her on her way home from the bus stop.

She’s the only one who notices all its different license plates.

* * *

 

He’s at her window.

He’s in her bed.

* * *

 

He’s used to live inside her head.

But something else lives there now.

* * *

 

_“Take off your clothes.”-“That’s enough.”-“Wait here.”_

She holds her breasts in her crossed hands, tied tight at the wrist.

It’s cold in the desert at night so he drapes her in his jacket as he tells her to get out of the car. He drags his knife down her belly where there should be a scar, right down to the simple bow of her simple panties that the blood’s never been washed from.

 _“Do you want to cut me again?”_ she asks.

_“I just wanted to see, Kate.”_

_“See what?”_

_“See you. I missed you when you were gone.”_

She wakes up knowing just what his soul would taste like and curls around her own hunger pains.

* * *

 

She’s not expecting the cartoon scrawl to cross her desk.

Caricature of herself, blindfolded, gagged, bound.

Cartoon cocks pointing at her, her brother’s lacrosse team sniggering.

Scorn and derision are like tonging an electric socket.

Others are rarely so bold, it’s almost uplifting to be treated as something less than precious again.

* * *

 

She’s expecting the car idling in the school parking lot.

It’s amazing how much the world won’t see when you’re dressed in a suit and mind your manners and it’s amazing how easy it is to blend in in Texas with a denim jacket, a baseball cap, and a pick-up truck.

He’s not expecting her to come around from the tail gate when he’s been watching the line of school buses.

He’s not expecting her to sit passenger and ask him if he’s been waiting long.

* * *

 

The trek out of the woods is harder than the walk into the desert the night she died was, more silent than the car ride then, or now.

She wasn’t expecting he’d try to kill her then either,but expectation is an everyday thing and a universal kind of currency.

It’s important but it’s not everything.

He whistles. “Tanner really worked you over.”

Her resurrection hardly miraculous. Not easily, but simply done. At least the professor had a good enough excuse. He wants the pair of young gods dead too.

The vacant stretch around them in the foreclosed part of town is its own kind of holy land, there’s despair in the ground beneath them.

“You got there first,” she reminds him.

He smirks. “Yeah, I did. Didn’t I?”

“What’s wrong?” she asks, for all his bravado he doesn’t look settled.

“Nothing, just wondering who the fuck you are and what crawled inside you after I left.”

His knife opens against his solid thigh. “What did Tanner put inside you?” he asks.

She smiles and laughs, but it’s mirthless.

“Not his dick, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re the only one.”

It’s not seduction if she’s mocking him.

His brows raise and his eyes are wide, for a moment he has nothing to say. He recovers.

“That’s sweet.”

“You left me there.”

“Yeah, you going to cry about it?”

It sounds like something his brother would say, her head hurts, she presses the heel of her hand between her eyes. “Will you come over here and hold me if I do?” she asks him.

“Not a chance.” He points with his knife. “I know what you are,” he says.

“What am I?’

“A fucking dead girl,” he answers, matter of fact.

“Want me to remind you what it feels like?” she asks him, stepping closer, he almost steps back.

“I remember what you feel like. What about you? You been dreaming of me? There is something else inside of you, right? I can get it out, if you let me.”

She scoffs. “You put your teeth and your cock and your knife in me, don’t worry about _something_ else.”

He really shouldn’t be worried about anything else but her daddy’s shotgun that she’s left behind the stripped HVAC system she’s perched herself up on days ago when she went looking for the perfect place to see him alone again.

He’s still made of a man’s makings, will still splatter just the same, viscera all over the grass in chunks of red like the can of Ravioli her brother blew up on the fourth of July when he was twelve.

She’s faster than him, the knife still hits her but she tugs it from her thigh like a bobby pin from her hair.

He’s only got the prayers of one virgin, she’s living off of mothers’ anguish and fathers’ guilt, she can heal faster than he can.

* * *

 

The long walk home feels lonely without him.

She remembers sitting beside him on a beach somewhere in a shitty part of the world.

She remembers how he burns in the sun and thinks of him sprawled out for the coming dawn.

She turns around and goes back just a few hours before the sun climbs back up to burn him away.

It’s not enough.

* * *

 

He’s still lying on the ground, buckshot ruining his jeans and jacket.

He coughs blood all over his own lips to say: “Hey dead girl, what’s up? Back for more?”

He looks pale, defanged. Not quite helpless enough though.

She stands over him, gun pressed down over his sternum, she rests her weight on it.

“You’re pathetic,” she says.

He doesn’t refute it.

Her dress blows around her knees, her hair falls over her shoulders. He doesn’t need to say it for her to hear that he thinks she looks beautiful since she’s grown up.

He thinks he tits look bigger.

He struggles in the grass, not enough to matter, barely enough to count as she grinds the gun barrel down.

He doesn’t want to _hurt_ her.

She trails the barrel down and cants her head at the inhale he sucks through his teeth.

“Low blow,” he grits out.

“I’m just kidding. Pussy.”

He laughs blood again, stopping when she puts the gun down beside him. He looks at it, considering his chances of there being another shell in it.

He looks up at her hands, gun kept in his peripheries but attention on the underwear she’s dropped beside his head.

She sits over his groin, pushing against him there, taking his hand and putting it on her naked hip and he’s stopped thinking about shooting her, mostly.

His knife is in the grass but he doesn’t try to use it.

His thick fingers are so hot inside of her it does hurt, just for a moment.

He laughs at the stars.

“You’re bleeding aren’t you? I can smell it. Girls get so horny on their periods.”

* * *

 

She doesn’t know if she should call it eating or feeding or something else, it’s consumption, at least.

Her brother’s lacrosse team has souls that taste acrid and beery, all froth, no real sustenance.

They’re easy meals on her way home through the woods.

She watches him eat too, his share of the spoils.

He might even try to hold her hand but she knows it’s because he’s pretending, he won’t try to kill her before he’s figured her out.

He tries to kiss her in her backyard but stops, smiling softly, looking up at the house, backstepping behind the trees, she leaves the shotgun on a deck chair and steps up onto the patio as her mother opens the back door.

“Kate? What are you doing out here so late?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“I don’t like you out so late.”

“I’m sorry. I’m going to bed now.”

She can see her underwear hanging from a low branch the next afternoon.

* * *

 

“There’s a lot of rage in you.”

“Yeah, of course there is,” she tells the ranger who’s come to call on her daddy, see how she’s doing without asking her himself.

“You’ve got a family that cares about you.”

What she has is a monster in her back yard, watching from the treeline, her menses still in the back of his throat and under his nails.

“Thank you, but I already knew that, Ranger McGraw.”

He offers her a hat tip and she struggles to not return the finger.

* * *

 

“They’re all downstairs,” she tells him, fresh through her window.

He’s dressed down again. Cowboy boots, belt buckle, more denim.

“Please, I know,” he says, catching her looking.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Why not?” he asks pushing away from her daisy curtained window. “Biblically I’d be your husband now, that’s how it works right? Whoever fucks you first owns you?”

“That why you’re here?” she asks, toeing the bedroom door halfway closed. He watches her do it, eyebrow raised when she doesn’t push it all the way closed.

“So what?”

“…”

“What if I told you I was here to eat your family? What could you do about it, really?”

“Well that’s not it, so what are you doing here?” She asks, sitting to spin in her desk chair.

“Come with me,” he commands, expecting her to listen.

“No.”

“I could make you.”

“You can’t make me do anything.”

She stands up again and pulls him closer by his belt buckle, backs him up to her bed and pushes the leather tongue of his belt free, unbuttoning, unzipping, reaching down between his legs, pulling the back of his jeans down. He puts a hand on her head as she drops to her knees, looks startled when she looks up at him. Her teeth not even touching him yet.

He scowls, hand moving to fist her coverlet instead as he sits, something in his hand had looked at her, something had been staring back at her from it.

“I could bite it off,” she tells him.

“Explain that to your mother,” he says, pressing back up, pulling her hair. He looks at the door, expression tepid. “She’s coming to say goodnight.”

He hides under her bed, legs folded so his shoes don’t reveal him like some wicked witch, head pressed between her thighs, as she kneels and clasps her hands, eyes closed as her mother comes in, smiling at the door. She comes in to pray on the other side of the bed and a hand sneaks up between her own thighs pulling the crotch of her underwear aside to lick at her, the slick sounds of a tongue hiding under her mother’s grateful tears and mumbled prayers.

“I love you so much, Katie baby.”

“I know.”

Her mother goes and shuts the door behind her.

Kate laughs and leans forward to bit at her blankets, the sigh she feels against her sex is one of relief, finally able to stretch out his legs and come up from under the bed like the monster he wants to be, folding her over her own bed, warm palm holding her hips down as he kneels to eat, giving her the tongue lashing she deserves.

* * *

 

She thought about being the last person alive in the world, being late to something that saved or killed everyone else.

She knows that she is the killing thing now, the saved thing.

He told her that human beings could be solitary if they wanted to.

She told him she only wanted to go home.

“What about you,” she asks. “Do you want to go home now?”

“I don’t have a home,” he tells her, shirt gone, jeans open, across her bed with his boots still on.

It’s a lie.

She hands him a washcloth and brushes out her hair.

* * *

 

He comes to her daddy’s church, shakes his hand and tells him how much he liked the sermon.

She smirks from the first pew.

* * *

 

“Come back tonight,” she tells him.

“What for?”

“I don’t think you like being alone at all.”

* * *

 

She can tell them anything and they will let her go.

When she leaves she knows that they’ll go on with their lives as if she was never a part of it at all.

She walks out to his car parked down the block. He’s not surprised this time.

They drive through the night and she touches her fingers over the hand he keeps on the stick shift.

* * *

 

He takes off all his clothes for her and lies down on the hotel queen that he dwarfs under his big body.

It does feel good to settle down over him and feel his body open hers up again, stretching her wide and punching out the air in her lungs.

Her looks smug until her blood in his mouth turns his eyes red, makes him thrash and fuck up harder into her, arms holding her around the waist, forcing her back down over him, again and again.

He’s the one praying to her now.

“You’re pathetic,” she tells him.

He comes.

Rolls her over and does it again.

* * *

 

“I fell asleep,” he says, rubbing his eyes.

She eats a handful of vending machine fare from the foot of the bed, watching television.

“Yeah, like a little kid,” she agrees.

“Where are we going?”

“A place I’ve been dreaming of.”

He strokes her naked back with a fan of long fingers off an arm that barely need to reach.

“What are your parents going to do while you’re gone.”

It’s strange to hear him worry, he has temporal concerns that he never had before.

She shrugs. “I told them not to worry, so they won’t.”

“It’s really that easy?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe I should thank the professor after all.”

“Whatever,” she says, lying back on his hand and opening her legs so he can crawl between them again, press down on her and make it hard to breath.

His knife opens in her hand, stashed under the pillow.  She stretches up, his dick twitches between her naked thighs.

She slashes him before he catches her wrist, points the obsidian against her own skin, dragging it down between her breasts.

He grins like a little fucking boy.

* * *

 

The old farm is by expectation abandoned.

He stops short of the ladder leading down beneath the barn.

“You’re not scared of the dark, are you?” she asks him.

He scowls, following even when he knows he shouldn’t.

* * *

 

“This is messed up. You knew this was here,” he accuses.

She shrugs. “Yeah, of course I did.”

The letters have been coming in the mail for months, the maps in them written by hand, signed by the same name. She knows someone who wants the same things she does.

“So what? You think this means anything?” he says, angry with her. “Trying to scare me and play a little game. I know games too Kate, I don’t think you’ll like it when I really start to play with you.”

“We’ll see.”

The fucking is just another ingredient he doesn’t realize he’s contributing, she’s not the sacrifice this time around even with his hands around her throat and his knife up close to her eyes.

He doesn’t hear it when someone else starts talking in the cave, too caught up with what’s between her legs again, she pulls him closer with ankles behind his angry hips.

The carvings in the dirt glow with hellscape colors and a doorway opens up like a mouth behind him.

“It’s called Xibalba, it’s home for you too. You said you missed home, remember?”

“Wait till I get back.”

He struggles against her limbs, his knife in one hand, his open palm in the other.

“Come see me when you do, asshole.”

She uncurls herself from him, he stumbles when she kicks out with her naked feet.

* * *

 

It’s nice to have a pet.

His cut out eye rolls in its jar, she wonders if he can still see, she lets it watch her undress for bed and then fall asleep where they’ve fucked the afternoon before, staying up past his bedtime.

She takes his gun and his car and his money and leaves Texas behind while wearing his jacket.

There’s still a brother lurking around the world like something that deserves to be feared who she wants to put inside of a trunk.

 

 


End file.
